Life University Staff Council Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 3, Summer 2015 | Page 3

Continued from page 2

Tidbits
 WD-40 literally stands for Water

 The names of all the continents end with the

Displacement, 40th attempt. That’s the name
straight out of the lab book used by the
chemist who developed WD-40 back in 1953.
The chemist, Norm Larsen, was attempting
to concoct a formula to prevent corrosion.
 In 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Col.

Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well.

letter they start with.
 American-style football was originally

played in the Middle Ages between
neighboring towns and villages, who
would clash in a heaving mass of people
struggling to drag an inflated pig’s bladder
by any means possible to markers at each
end of the town.

 Water expands by about 9 percent as it

freezes.

 The fastest speed achieved while

blindfolded on a motorcycle is 165 mph.
 Yellow was chosen as the national school

bus color in 1939 at a conference organized
by Frank W. Cyr, PH.D, the “father of the
yellow school bus.”
 The shortest interstate route is I-97 from

Annapolis to Baltimore, MD. It’s 17.62 miles
long.
 The league is not a current unit of measure,

but it used to represent how far a man could
walk in an hour – about 3 miles.

 A short ton is equivalent to 20

hundredweights. Each hundredweight
is 100 pounds. Prior to the 15th century,
a hundredweight actually weighed 108
pounds.
 The standard dry erase board found in most

classrooms is likely t